Pessel, Michelle

Michelle Pessel ( fr. Michel Peissel ; 1937 - 2011 ^[1] ) - French anthropologist , traveler and writer. He is famous for discovering Mayan archaeological sites made at the age of 21 on the Quintana Roo Peninsula, as well as for numerous trips to the poorly studied areas of the Himalayas and Tibet , the description of which is devoted to most of his books. He is an honorary member of the New York Club of Explorers and a member of the Royal Geographical Society .

Michel Pessel's childhood passed in England . For a year, he studied at Oxford University , then at Harvard Business School. He received his doctorate in ethnography from the University of Sorbonne (Paris).

In 1958 , at the age of 21, finding himself on the coast of Quintana Roo, Mexico , Pessel walked along the coast for more than 300 kilometers, separating it from Belize (then British Honduras), simultaneously discovering 14 previously unknown Mayan culture monuments. Thanks to this journey, he decided to change his life, and leave his studies at Harvard Business School to study anthropology and research the last unexplored areas of Tibet and the Himalayas.

To this end, Michel Pessel began to study spoken Tibetan . Interest in the language arose almost by accident, after the purchase in the Paris second-hand bookstore “Grammar of Spoken Tibetan Language” by Charles Bell , a famous English specialist in Tibet at the beginning of the 20th century. Then he began to take Tibetan language lessons from Tibetans who emigrated from their homeland after the Chinese invasion of Tibet. As a result, Pessel became one of the few Europeans at that time who spoke the Tibetan language, which, of course, became a considerable help in his expeditions. At the same time, he did not know the classical and literary Tibetan language.

Territories covered by Michel Pessel

In 1959, Michel Pessel organized his first expedition, the purpose of which was to study the Sherpas living in the Mount Everest region . In 1964, he traveled to Mustang , a little-known Nepalese principality whose population speaks Tibetan. A book about this journey, Mustang: The Lost Kingdom of Tibet, published in 1967, has become an international bestseller. This expedition was followed by another 28 trips to remote areas of the Tibetan-speaking world. In 1968, Michel Pessel became one of the first Europeans to cross Bhutan and explore its eastern regions. He was the first to study in detail the Principality of Zaskar in Kashmir , and later studied the people of the Minaro ( Dard ) in Baltistan and Ladakh , while trying to establish the location of the "land of ants digging gold" mentioned by Herodotus .

In 1973, Michel Pessel crossed the Himalayas between the mountains of Annapurna and Dhaulagiri on a hovercraft. Later he traveled on such a ship up the Ganges and along the east coast of Yucatan . He invented and patented the first hovercraft with a single propeller.

In 1986, he became one of the first foreigners to infiltrate the Kings and Brahmaputra Gorges in tropical Tibet. In 1994, he led an expedition to find the source of the Mekong , following the Black Mekong (Dza Nak) - historically the main river bed. Thus, he became the discoverer of the historical source of the third longest river in Asia (ten years later, the Chinese announced the discovery of the geographical, that is, the most remote from the mouth, source of the Mekong lying in the upper White Mekong).

In 1987, Pessel, together with Mexican archaeologists, built a huge nautical hollowed Mayan canoe on which they sailed and paddled 500 miles along the coast of Yucatan and Belize to demonstrate the role of maritime trade for Maya.

In 1989, Pessel with six satellites on their copy of a long Viking boat traveled on oars and sail 2,400 km up the Western Dvina River and down the Dnieper from the Baltic to the Black Sea . The expedition followed in the footsteps of the Varangians .

He died in October 2011 from a heart attack.